But last week’s runnerup finish at Phoenix International Raceway had a much different feel to it.

Coming off his monumental win in the season-opening Daytona 500, the second-place finish at Phoenix was yet another step in the right direction for his surging team.

While Earnhardt obviously was a bit disappointed to finish second to Kevin Harvick, he was much more excited and encouraged by the fact that he ran up front throughout the race and continued his strong start to the season and a hot streak that began late last year. Dating back to last season, he has five straight top-five finishes and six top-fives in his last seven races, including three seconds.

Though he was no match for the dominant Harvick, he ran in the top five all day at Phoenix and clearly had the second-best car.

“I would have loved to have won the race, am a little disappointed to have come that close,” he said. “But our team is performing so well. Got a lot of great chemistry and good communication going back and forth. Everybody's confidence is very high. Everybody's mood and morale is really high.

“Hopefully we can maintain that and not have any bad luck or make any mistakes and continue to keep working towards winning more races.”

Earnhardt leads the points standings after the first two races for the second time in his career — he also led after two races in 2004, when he won the Daytona 500 and finished fifth at Rockingham. His latest run is starting to feel a lot like 2004, when he won a career-high six races and was in the championship hunt until the end before winding up fifth in the inaugural Chase.

He believes more wins are coming. Though he has finished second seven times over the past two seasons, the last few runnerup finishes have felt different.

“If we run second enough, we're bound to at least trip into one or two (smiling),” he said after the Phoenix race. “We ran second quite a few races in the last 10 or so races we run. I feel really good. I feel like we're coming around the corner, peaking at the right time this season to try to run for the championship.”

Another encouraging sign for Earnhardt is that, like Harvick, his teams seems to have adjusted to the new aero rules quickly — at least at Phoenix.

“Seems like we aren't behind,” he said. “We aren't where the 4 car (Harvick) is, but we're definitely close. Hopefully we can learn what we need to learn rapidly in the next several weeks so we can get up to par and win some races.

“There's a couple teams out there that are behind, not onto the new package and new rules. I'm glad that we're doing pretty well. The performance is there for us.”

Sprint Cup teams will get an extra four hours of track time at Las Vegas during a special four-hour test session on Thursday. Earnhardt did not test much during the offseason so he is looking forward to the session and to doing more testing in the coming weeks.

“We just got to work hard, harder than everybody else,” he said. “We got a lot of tests lined up.

“We didn’t test much in the offseason, didn’t want to burn ourselves out before the season started. That’s going to help us, I think, really learn a lot more. We’re already relatively competitive now. The testing should help us even more.”